Born Survivors (32 page)

Anka, too, was struggling to stay upright and positive. ‘It was raining and it was snowing and then the sun shone and we were squashed in that coal dust … cold and hot, and hot and cold, and unwashed and hungry … when it rained the soot stuck to us so how we must have looked. I am glad I didn’t see myself … Human spirit kept me going.’

On or about 18 April, the train pulled into a siding near Triebschitz, not far from the city of Most, to allow priority transports carrying munitions and wounded soldiers to pass. There the women from Freiberg remained, becalmed, for several days until it was safe to move on. In a parallel siding was a transport from the Buchenwald forced labour and concentration camp in Germany, which had been liberated in early April. Some of the prisoners evacuated prior to liberation called out to ask for news. They even managed to throw each other some lice-infected garments before the Freiberg train moved off again towards Most.

Located between the Central Bohemian Uplands and the Ore Mountains, Most – renamed Brüx by the Germans – was heavily industrialised and had a major railway junction to service its petrochemical and synthetic fuel plants. British and American bombers taking part in the so-called ‘Oil Campaign of World War II’ attacked it repeatedly. In spite of these continuing bombardments and with the Czech railway system in a shambles, the Freiberg train was directed onwards and slowly made its way towards the steel town of Chomutov. Then, in the growing confusion, it was turned around and sent back where it came from, away from the approaching American front.

Somewhere en route they stopped so that another transport carrying approximately nine hundred prisoners from Flossenbürg and its satellite camp Venusberg could be coupled to their train. There were also prisoners from a camp that manufactured bazookas, antitank rocket launchers. Not that the women from the Freia factory were aware of what was happening in the next wagon, let alone at the far end of their transport. They were fighting simply to stay alive.

Forced to a halt in a vulnerable location and clearly visible from the air, their snaking train ended up caught between Most and Chomutov when the two cities came under major aerial attack on 19 April. In the middle of that night, in the midst of an air raid, Rachel’s waters broke. As Allied pilots dropped their deadly cargo
and bombs shook the earth far around, she went into labour. Sprawled on the faeces-covered floor of the wagon in which lay several women who’d recently died, Rachel shivered in her waterlogged blanket. Feeling the contractions ripple through her belly for the first time, she knew that the baby conceived with Monik in their little room in the Łódź ghetto what seemed like a lifetime ago was determined to push its way into the world regardless.

Panting, she tightly gripped the arm of her sister Bala as the contractions contorted her body. The guard called for help and someone found the Czech doctor Edita Mautnerová, who’d helped Priska give birth to Hana and who ran the infirmary in Freiberg. Guards held up a torch so that the doctor could see when the baby’s head began to show. Word quickly spread along the train that a child was being born, so some of the other guards crawled out from under the wagons to watch and – no doubt – place bets. Rachel was indignant. ‘Can you imagine lying in an open coal train giving birth to a child with women all around?’

For hours, illuminated by anti-aircraft fire as the April rain soaked her skin, she arched back against the wagon as she fought the waves of pain. Then, some time that night or early the next morning, sodden and cold, she emitted a last scream and gave bloody birth to a tiny creature. The child, who barely looked human, was so small and – someone told her – a boy. ‘Another Jew for the Führer!’ one of the SS guards cried, laughing.

In the darkness of her bunk at Freiberg, when she’d allowed herself to think of the baby growing inside her, Rachel had secretly decided to name him Max (later to be known as Mark). Covered in his mother’s blood, his whole body was wrinkled and he had a tight, scrunched-up face. He must have weighed less than three pounds. Too weak to be happy, his mother felt numb. ‘I was like, “So I have a child, or I don’t have a child.” We didn’t know what was going to happen.’ In that unspeakable squalor and with no sharp objects to hand, no one knew how to sever the umbilical cord that had connected the baby to his mother and kept him alive
until then. Someone suggested Rachel bite through it. Eventually an SS guard handed the doctor a dirty razor blade. ‘They also found a cardboard box used for bread and they put the baby in,’ she said. ‘It was raining and snowing so I was holding the baby in the box all the time.’

Incredibly, like Priska, Rachel had a little breast milk and was able to nurse her newborn. She wouldn’t have known it, but the bodies of malnourished pregnant women have been known to recognise the size and vulnerability of their babies and produce milk that is surprisingly high in fat, even though the process of doing so depletes the mother dangerously. ‘I was glad I had enough milk,’ she said. But there was nothing with which to wash her son, and little to keep him warm or protect him from the weather.

‘What date is it?’ Rachel asked, determined to remember her son’s birthday, whether he lived or died. Nobody could be sure, but the SS guard who’d cared for her said, ‘Say that the boy was born on Hitler’s birthday – April 20th. It might save him.’ Rachel was even handed a small ‘extra ration’ of bread at that point – not because she’d just given birth but because the guards realised it was the Führer’s birthday. In a moment of rare humanity, another guard gave her an old shirt to wrap around her baby. She was still wearing the ‘cripple’s’ dress with a yoke she’d been given at Auschwitz, but after seven months of continual wear it was threadbare and torn and she was shivering with cold and shock. As she delivered the afterbirth, someone found her a coat and draped it around her shoulders.

Quite overcome, Rachel asked if she could see her other two sisters, so the guard walked the length of the train calling for Sala and Ester. When the two young women, several wagons further along, first heard their names being called they were afraid to answer, but eventually they responded. ‘Your sister’s had a son,’ they were told.

‘Can we see her?’ they asked, amazed. They were even more surprised to be told they could. Helped down from their wagon for the first time in days, they staggered to the car where their nephew had
been born and found him and his mother in an extremely sorry state. ‘She was huddled in the corner in an overcoat. It was not a pretty picture,’ Sala said. The wagon stank and there were women dead or dying near by. ‘She was so ill and we were so sure that the baby wouldn’t survive that we couldn’t even be happy for her. Then they took us back to our wagon. We were crying because we thought we’d never see either of them again.’

With no end to their suffering in sight, their train moved off, at speed this time, past bombed Chomutov towards the town of Zatec. It was their eighth day on the transport and they stopped again and waited and waited. ‘Now and then some people threw some bread into the trucks for us to eat. That was indescribable,’ Anka said. Mostly, the guard who was with them grabbed the bread and refused to share it, but sometimes they were able to catch a piece and eat it quickly. Anka, encumbered by her bump, never did. Half-lying, half-sitting, and describing herself as ‘the epitome of living hunger’, she heard from an inmate who could see over the top of the wagon that scores of Nazi flags were flying. ‘It’s Hitler’s birthday,’ the guard explained.

‘Then it is my birthday too,’ Anka replied weakly, and her friends tried to cheer her by joking that the red and black flags were really for her. Trying to remember what year it was, she realised it must be 1945, which meant that she was twenty-eight years old. Hearing that it was her birthday, the guard unexpectedly tossed her some bread. This manna from heaven seemed like a small miracle after she’d received so little for so long. As she clutched the morsel to her like a prize, never before since she’d been born on 20 April 1917, to Stanislav and Ida Kauder in Třebechovice pod Orebem, had Anka been pleased to share the date of the Führer’s birth.

Watching the position of the sun as the Allied planes wheeled and spun to avoid the constant flak, the women on the train speculated that they were heading south to Plzeň one of the frontier cities of annexed Sudetenland. Plzeň was famous for its Pilsner beer, but what they didn’t know was that it was also the place where the
Wehrmacht chose to have its feared Panzer tanks manufactured at the huge Skoda Armaments complex. As the Soviets advanced on Plzeň ahead of the Americans, the US military repeatedly bombed the city and its railways to try to prevent the manufacture and mobilisation of any more Panzers, howitzers or tank destroyers at the plant that had been taken over by the Nazis. Then the Americans drew up plans to wipe out the factory ‘once and for all’, rather than have one of the Reich’s largest munitions factories fall into Soviet hands. Almost three hundred B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ bombers and some two hundred fighter aircraft from the Eighth Air Force were readied for the mission planned for Wednesday, 25 April 1945. It would be their final combat operation of the war.

With baby Max Friedman and his mother Rachel just skin and bone in one wagon, and Priska attempting to suckle sallow Hana in another, Anka held onto her swollen belly as their train approached the city, praying that she wouldn’t give birth just yet.

On Saturday, 21 April, with news of an imminent attack on Plzeň having been announced in advance by General Eisenhower, their train was forced to divert along a railway line no prisoner transport had ever taken before. In heavy rain, it arrived that night in the small town of Horní Bříza (renamed Ober Birken by the Germans), where it lurched to a halt under the jurisdiction of the town’s station master, Antonin Pavlíček.

A silver-haired father of two who’d lived and worked in the station house since 1930, Mr Pavlíček prided himself on running a clockwork service for the railways and the almost 3,000 inhabitants of his town. He was also known for keeping meticulous records. He was responsible for the supervision of several staff and was greatly admired throughout his community as someone of the highest standing and character.

Horní Bříza, whose sole industry was a nineteenth-century kaolin factory, had managed to remain largely untouched by war. Its five Jews had been rounded up and sent away to concentration camps soon after German occupation and there had been a few minor
disturbances between the Hitler Youth and local teenagers, but otherwise the townspeople’s lives were undisturbed by Nazi rule. The West Bohemian Kaolin and Fireclay factory, established in the town in 1899, even remained in Czech control under occupation. It mined 40,000 tons of kaolin a year and produced 22,000 tons of ceramic goods, fireclay and silica, mostly for export. A few partisans who worked in the factory had caused some trouble, bringing the unwelcome attention of the Gestapo from Plzeň (who took the agitators away never to be heard of again), but aside from those few unfortunate events, life continued much as it had before the war.

Antonin Pavlíček, stationmaster at Horní Bříza

With frequent air raids on Plzeň and neighbouring areas, Mr Pavlíček suddenly found himself in charge of a far busier section of railway line. On 12 April, a train full of collaborationist Soviet soldiers from the Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the
Peoples of Russia (known as ‘Vlasovites’ under Red Army General Andrey Vlasov) arrived at Horní Bříza, attracting Allied fire. Fleeing from their train, they abandoned it. Five days later, at dawn on 17 April, Soviet fighter planes swooped in overhead, bombing buildings and cutting the electricity supply to the town. As the air-raid sirens wailed, nine planes also attacked the abandoned Vlasovite transport and locomotives, damaging nearby warehouses. Mr Pavlíček, who refused to leave his post, kept careful notes and when the electricity was turned back on he gave an almost blow-by-blow account to his superiors in Prague, the record of which remains on file.

Vlasovite train with carriages at Horni Briza

Four days later, on the evening of 21 April, the transport from Freiberg rolled into the heavily wooded valley and drew to a halt at Horní
Bříza. Previously, any ‘specials’ such as this would have bypassed the town to take the faster line south. With his usual efficiency, Mr Pavlíček noted that this train was number 7548 and arrived at precisely 20.58. ‘The train had forty-five wagons and consisted of three transports – one of men and two of women,’ he reported. Some of the wagons contained up to one hundred prisoners each and he estimated that the total number of passengers amounted to approximately 3,000. He also noted, ‘Two transports consisted of closed wagons whereas one transport of women consisted of fifteen semi-wagons.’